Privacy Policy

This Privacy Statement explains our practices, including your choices, regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of certain information, including your personal information in connection with the Cooking Academy service.

Contacting Us

If you have general questions about your account or how to contact customer service for assistance, please email contact@aaronmiddleton.co.uk. For questions specifically about this Privacy Statement, or our use of your personal information, cookies or similar technologies, please contact our Data Protection Officer/Privacy Office by email at contact@aaronmiddleton.co.uk.

The data controller of your personal information is Watkins & Middleton Limited. Please note that if you contact us to assist you, for your safety and ours we may need to authenticate your identity before fulfilling your request.

Collection of Information

We receive and store information about you such as:

  • Information you provide to us: We collect information you provide to us which includes:

    • your name, email address, address or postal code, payment method(s), telephone number. This may include gender and date of birth if you join an ad supported subscription plan. We collect this information in a number of ways, including when you enter it while using our service, interact with our customer service, or participate in surveys or marketing promotions;

  • Information we collect automatically: We collect information about you and your use of our service, your interactions with us and our advertising, as well as information regarding your network, network devices, and your computer or other devices (such as gaming systems, smart TVs, mobile devices, set top boxes, and other media devices). This information includes:

    • your activity on the site; such as when you are on the site, and which pages or content of the site you are using.

    • your interactions with our emails;

    • details of your interactions with our customer service, such as the date, time and reason for contacting us, transcripts of any chat conversations, and if you call us, your phone number and call recordings;

    • device IDs or other unique identifiers, including for your network devices (such as your router);

    • resettable device identifiers (also known as advertising identifiers), such as those on mobile devices, tablets, and streaming media devices that include such identifiers (see the "Cookies and Internet Advertising" section below for more information);

    • device and software characteristics (such as type and configuration), connection information including type (wifi, cellular), statistics on page views, referring source (for example, referral URLs), IP address (which can be used to tell us your general location, such as your city, state/province, and postal code), browser and standard web server log information;

    • information collected via the use of cookies, web beacons and other technologies, including ad information (such as information on the availability and delivery of ads, the site URL, as well as the date and time). (See our "Cookies and Internet Advertising" section for more details.)

  • Information from other sources: We also obtain information from other sources. We protect this information according to the practices described in this Privacy Statement, plus any additional restrictions imposed by the source of the information. These sources vary over time, but could include:

    • service providers that help us determine a location based on your IP address in order to customize our service and for other uses consistent with this Privacy Statement;

    • security service providers that provide us with information to secure our systems, prevent fraud and help us protect the security of members accounts;

    • publicly-available sources such as publicly available posts on social media platforms and information available through public databases associating IP addresses with internet service providers (ISPs);

Use of Information

We use information to provide, analyze, administer, enhance and personalize our services and marketing efforts, to process your registration, your membership, account, and your payments, and to communicate with you on these and other topics. For example, we use such information to:

  • determine your general geographic location (such as your city, state/province, and postal code);

  • help us quickly and efficiently respond to inquiries and requests;

  • secure our systems, prevent fraud and help us protect the security of member’s accounts;

  • prevent, detect and investigate potentially prohibited or illegal activities, including fraud, and to enforce our terms (such as determining whether a particular device is permitted to use the account consistent with our Terms of Use);

  • analyze and understand our audience, improve our service (including our user interface experiences and service performance) and optimize content or ad selection, recommendation algorithms and delivery;

  • communicate with you concerning our service so that we can send you news about The Cooking Academy details about new features and content available, special offers, promotional announcements, consumer surveys, and to assist you with operational requests such as password reset requests. These communications may be by various methods, such as email, push notifications, text message, online messaging channels, social media, and matched identifier communications (described below).

Our legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described in this Privacy Statement will depend on the personal information concerned and the specific context in which we collect and use it. We will normally collect personal information from you where we need the personal information to perform a contract with you (for example, to provide our services to you), where the processing is in our legitimate interests and not overridden by your data protection interests or fundamental rights and freedoms, or where we have your consent to do so (for example, for you to participate in certain consumer insights activities like specific surveys and focus groups). In some cases, we may also have a legal obligation to collect personal information from you or may otherwise need the personal information to protect your vital interests or those of another person (for example, to prevent payment fraud or confirm your identity). For questions about our use of your personal information (including legal bases and transfer mechanisms we rely on), cookies or similar technologies, please contact our Data Protection Officer/Privacy Office by email at contact@aaronmiddleton.co.uk.

Disclosure of Information

We disclose your information for certain purposes and to third parties, as described below:

  • Service Providers: We use other companies, agents or contractors ("Service Providers") to perform services on our behalf or to assist us with the provision of services to you. For example, we engage Service Providers to provide marketing, advertising, communications, security, infrastructure and IT services, to customize, and optimize our service, to provide bank account or balance information, process credit card transactions or other payment methods, to provide customer service, to analyze and enhance information (including information about users' interactions with our service), and to process and administer consumer surveys. In the course of providing such services, these Service Providers may have access to your personal or other information. We do not authorize them to use or disclose your personal information except in connection with providing their services (which includes maintaining and improving their services).

  • Partners: As described above, you may have a relationship with one or more of our Partners, in which case we may share certain information with them in order to coordinate with them on providing the Cooking Academy service to members and providing information about the availability of the service. For example, depending on what Partner services you use, we may share information:

    • in order to facilitate Partner pre-paid promotions or collection of payment;

    • so that content and features available on the aaronmiddleton.co.uk site service can be suggested to you in the Partner’s user interface. For members, these suggestions are part of the cooking academy service.

  • Advertisers/Ad Measurement Companies: We may share information collected from or about you with Advertisers and/or Ad Measurement Companies to select advertisements, and measure and improve advertising effectiveness.

  • Promotional offers: We may offer joint promotions or programs that, in order for your participation, will require us to share your information with third parties. In fulfilling these types of promotions, we may share your name and other information in connection with fulfilling the incentive. Please note that these third parties are responsible for their own privacy practices.

  • Protection of The Cooking Academy, the aaronmiddleton.co.uk site and others. We and our partners may disclose and otherwise use your personal and other information where we or they reasonably believe such disclosure is needed to (a) satisfy any applicable law, regulation, legal process, or governmental request, (b) enforce applicable terms of use, including investigation of potential violations thereof, (c) detect, prevent, or otherwise address illegal or suspected illegal activities (including payment fraud), security or technical issues, or (d) protect against harm to the rights, property or safety of The Cooking Academy, its users or the public, as required or permitted by law.

  • Business transfers: In connection with any reorganization, restructuring, merger or sale, or other transfer of assets, we will transfer information, including personal information, provided that the receiving party agrees to respect your personal information in a manner that is consistent with our Privacy Statement.

Whenever in the course of sharing information we transfer personal information to other countries, we will ensure that the information is transferred in accordance with this Privacy Statement and as permitted by the applicable laws on data protection. Specifically, we use a variety of contractual, organizational and technical protections as appropriate for such transfers, including data protection agreements and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

You may also choose to disclose your information in the following ways:

  • certain portions of our service may contain a tool which gives you the option to share information by email, text message and social or other sharing applications, using the clients and applications on your smart device;

  • social plugins and similar technologies allow you to share information.

  • through social media sharing, including private groups.

Social plugins and social applications are operated by the social networks themselves, and are subject to their terms of use and privacy policies.

Access to Account

  • “Remember me” function: For ease of access to your account, you can use the "Remember me on this device" function when you log in to the website. This function uses technology that enables you to access your account without the input of security measures (such as your password and email address).

  • Giving others access to your account: If you share or otherwise allow others to have access to your account, they will be able to see account information (including your email address or other information in the "Account" area of our website).

Your Choices

Emails. If you no longer want to receive certain communications from us via email, simply tap the “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of any promotional email from us.

Cookies and Internet Advertising

We and our Service Providers use cookies and other technologies (such as web beacons), as well as resettable device identifiers, for various reasons. We want you to be informed about our use of these technologies, so this section explains the types of technologies we use, what they do, and your choices regarding their use. 

Cookies and similar technologies, web beacons, and resettable device identifiers

Cookies are small data files that are commonly stored on your device when you browse and use websites and online services. We use other technologies such as browser storage and plugins (e.g., HTML5, IndexedDB, and WebSQL). Like cookies, these other technologies may store small amounts of data on your device. Web beacons (also known as clear gifs or pixel tags) often work in conjunction with cookies. In many cases, declining cookies will impair the effectiveness of web beacons associated with those cookies.

Resettable device identifiers (also known as advertising identifiers) are similar to cookies and are found on many mobile devices and tablets (for example, the "Identifier for Advertisers" (or IDFA) on Apple iOS devices and the "Google Advertising ID" on Android devices), and certain streaming media devices. Like cookies, resettable device identifiers are used to make online advertising more relevant and for analytics and optimization purposes.   

Why do we use these technologies?

We use these types of technologies for various reasons, like making it easy to access our services by remembering you when you return; to provide, analyze, understand and enhance the use of our services; to enforce our terms, prevent fraud; to improve site performance, monitor visitor traffic and actions on our site; and to deliver and tailor our marketing or advertising, and to understand interactions with our emails, marketing, and online ads on third party sites.

To help you better understand how we use cookies and resettable device identifiers, please see the information below:

  • Essential cookies: These cookies are strictly necessary to provide our website or online service. For example, we and our Service Providers may use these cookies to authenticate and identify our members when they use our websites and applications so we can provide our service to them. They also help us to enforce our Terms of Use, prevent fraud and maintain the security of our service. 

  • Performance and functionality cookies: These cookies help us to customize and enhance your online experience with us. For example, they help us to prevent you from needing to re-enter information you previously provided (for example, during member sign up). We also use these cookies to collect information (such as popular pages, popular content, click-through and other information) about our visitors' use of the service so that we can enhance our website and service and conduct market research. Deletion of these types of cookies may result in limited functionality of our service. 

  • Advertising cookies and resettable device identifiers: These cookies and resettable device identifiers use information about your use of this and other websites and apps, your response to ads and emails, and to deliver ads that are more relevant to you and for analytics and optimization purposes.

When we advertise our services on other websites or apps, some of the websites and apps where we advertise, as well as advertising technology companies that we use to purchase, deliver, optimize, and/or measure our advertisements (collectively “Advertising Partners”), may receive information from us as part of our campaign targeting, measurement, and optimization (e.g., steps completed in sign-up and site visit). Common uses of this type of information are to judge the effectiveness of and optimize ad campaigns, by allowing Advertising Partners to see when someone who saw an ad later signed up for our service. Another common use is to make sure we do not serve ads trying to get individuals to sign up for the service if they are already a member on aaronmiddleton.co.uk.

How can I exercise choice regarding the technologies? 

  • There are a number of ways to exercise choice regarding technologies that are similar to cookies, such as browser storage and plugins (e.g., HTML5, IndexedDB, and WebSQL). For example, many popular browsers provide the ability to clear browser storage, commonly in the settings or preferences area.

Your Information and Rights

You can request access to your personal information, or correct or update out-of-date or inaccurate personal information we hold about you. You may also request that we delete personal information that we hold about you.

When you visit the "Account" portion of our website, where you have the ability to access and update a broad range of information about your account, including your contact information, your payment information, and various related information about your account. You must be signed in to access the "Account" section.

If you are the account owner, to download a copy of your personal information email contact@aaronmiddleton.co.uk.

For other requests, or if you have a question regarding our privacy practices, please contact our Data Protection Officer/Privacy Office at contact@aaronmiddleton.co.uk. We respond to all requests we receive from individuals wishing to exercise their data protection rights in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

Retention of Information: We may retain information as required or permitted by applicable laws and regulations, including to honor your choices, for our billing or records purposes and to fulfill the purposes described in this Privacy Statement. Specifically, we retain information for our legitimate interests and essential business purposes, such as operating, maintaining and improving our services; complying with our legal obligations; and exercising our legal rights and remedies, including enforcing our terms of use. Our retention of information is based on many factors such as your relationship with The Cooking Academy (for example, are you a current member); the nature of the information; compliance with our legal obligations; defending or resolving actual or anticipated legal claims. We take reasonable measures to destroy or de-identify personal information in a secure manner when it is no longer required.

Security

We use reasonable administrative, logical, physical and managerial measures to safeguard your personal information against loss, theft and unauthorized access, use and modification. These measures are designed to provide a level of security appropriate to the risks of processing your personal information.

Other Websites, Platforms and Applications

The Cooking Academy service may be provided through and/or utilize features (such as the display of social media content) operated by third party platforms, or contain links to sites operated by third parties whose policies regarding the handling of information may differ from ours. These websites and platforms have separate and independent privacy or data policies, privacy statements, notices and terms of use, which we recommend you read carefully.

Children

You must be at least 18 years of age or older to subscribe to The Cooking Academy service. Minors may only use the service with the involvement, supervision, and approval of a parent or legal guardian.

Changes to This Privacy Statement

We will update this Privacy Statement from time to time in response to changing legal, regulatory or operational requirements. We will provide notice of any such changes (including when they will take effect) in accordance with law. Your continued use of The Cooking Academy service after any such updates take effect will constitute acknowledgement and (as applicable) acceptance of those changes. If you do not wish to acknowledge or accept any updates to this Privacy Statement, you may cancel your membership at any time. To see when this Privacy Statement was last updated, please see the "Last Updated" section below.

Last Updated: August 2nd, 2023